Big Love Abroad Page 10

  "Okay," I breathed.

  I let him pull my hips backward yet more, so now I was bent at the waist, leaning forward, my ass presented to Ian. I wasn't quite breathing, taking short, shallow, sharp gasps of anticipation.

  "Close your eyes."

  I shut them. "Okay."

  "Tell me what you want me to do right now." His voice was a low murmur in my ear, his erection nestled between the globes of my ass.

  I pushed back against his ass; the words fuck me on the tip of my tongue. But then I realized I didn't want that, just yet. I wanted something else.

  So I asked for it. A simple thing, but with an acquiescence new to me.

  "Spank me, Ian."

  SMACK! "You like that, do you?"

  I lurched forward when his hand cracked across the left globe of my ass, leaving it tremoring and stinging. "Yeah, I do."

  "Has anyone ever spanked you before, Nina?"

  "No. Only you, Ian."

  SMACK! The right cheek, now. And then his fingers slid between my thighs, speared gently into my wet cleft and scissored within me. I gasped, and my knees buckled. Another loud slap to my left ass cheek, timed to a press of his fingers against my clit, and I fell forward so my forehead thunked against the door.

  I cried out in ecstasy, ready for the next smack to my right cheek. But when it came, it was on the same side, and was followed by a soft, gently smoothing circle of his palm, soothing the stinging flesh, and I let out a moan. Which was quickly turned into a shriek as Ian scissored his fingers deep inside me and slapped me on the right side, quick, hard, and unexpected. Again. A third time on the same side, and now my flesh there was really starting to smart and I was on the verge of asking him to stop, but then he gave me a third smack and drove his fingertips in and curled them, slid them in and out, creating wet suction sounds, and I felt like I was being ripped in two, sliced open by a sudden rush of clenching heat made all the more delicious somehow for the sweet slight sting of pain on my rear. I let out a breathless moan and Ian switched to the other side, smacking my left globe and finger-fucking me in time with the SMACK--SMACK--SMACK of his big hard hand against my stinging, trembling skin.

  An orgasm of continental proportions tore through me, ripping a scream from my lungs, and as I came--knees buckling, breasts swaying and nipples tight, taut, and achingly hard--Ian plunged his cock into me and I lost my breath, lost my capacity to even scream.

  No warning, no guiding nudge of his fingers, just a sudden wrenching orgiastic fullness, split open and fucked silent. I shook all over, fought to remain upright. Ian's hands gripped my hips and tugged me backward so I was nearly off balance now, bent completely in half at the waist, torso level with the floor, feet spread wide apart, hands scrabbling at the wood of the door for something to hold on to.

  I couldn't move to push back, couldn't breathe for the vise grip of the orgasm still clamped down on my body. I could only scream silently, breathless, as Ian buried himself into me.

  And then he pulled back, hesitated a beat, two, and then drove back in.

  The shearing wave of bliss as his thrust broke something open in me, and I was finally able to gasp for breath. I hung my head and planted a fist against the door, dragging in deep breaths and preparing for the next onslaught of slamming thrusts. A moment of equilibrium, and then he was plunging into me, knocking me forward and filling me until I felt close to rupturing.

  "Ian...Jesus, Ian!" I felt everything inside me tightening, clamping down. I was already taut and hard and aching, and as he thrust, thrust, thrust, flesh slapping against flesh, I tightened and hardened further, until I was a million points of diamond hardness, yet ready to fracture into countless scintillating fragments at a single touch.

  "Nina...oh god Nina, I'm coming..." Ian breathed. "Nina, love, god--I'm coming--so hard--so hard it hurts, Nina."

  There it went. That was it. The one touch I needed to fly apart, to melt, to spasm, to fracture and fragment and detonate and lose all hold upon myself.

  It was his voice, that accent, that silky rumble. It was his hand, carving tenderly up my spine, pressing gently; it was his hand, gripping my creased hip and pulling me back into his desperate, faltering thrusts. It was the note of pleading in his voice, the way he sounded as if only I could make him come this hard, as if I possessed some magic, some inexorable control over him.

  It was that word, love, tossed out so casually, a slang word, not meant to declare undying commitment, just thrown out in the heat of the moment.

  That word was what undid me.

  Because, see, deep, deep down, I was desperate for love.

  My parents controlled me. They provided for me. They set rules and parameters to keep me safe, to keep me sheltered, to keep me set apart from the evils of the world. They sent me to college. They gave me so much, and I was grateful.

  But never once in my life had my father told me he loved me. I want what's best for you, Nina, he'd say. You're my daughter, he'd say, it's my job to keep you safe. And boys like that, at that age, they're just not safe. And he was right, I know that. Focus on school, Nina. Concentrate on your studies, Nina. Won't you consider studying for the bar exam, Nina? You have such intelligence; it's wasted on a literature degree.

  And Mom? The love you read about in your books, Nina...it doesn't exist in real life. You must be practical. How will you find a job when all you do all day is read? How will you find a good, solid man when your nose is stuck in a book?

  Maria, my eldest sister: Boys are fun, Nina. But you can't trust them. Look at me, I know from experience. Maria was a single mom, with a seven-year-old daughter and a baby-daddy who'd run off the moment Maria saw the blue cross on the pregnancy test.

  Protected, advised, sheltered, provided for?

  Yes.

  Hugged, kissed, encouraged? Loved?

  No.

  And I knew I wouldn't find love by tumbling into bed with every guy that showed a bit of interest. I saw the consequences of that lived out in painful detail by my other sister, Luisa. He's the ONE! she'd claim. And then, a few months later, she'd be crying on Mom's shoulder, decrying all men as assholes because--surprise surprise!--she dated an asshole and, shockingly, he'd forget to stop being an asshole.

  And now, bent over at the front door of a rented flat in London, a gorgeous, kind, intelligent, successful man was standing behind me, fucking me with everything he had, calling me love...I wanted him to mean it. I wanted it to not be a throwaway word.

  All of these thoughts scoured through my brain in the space of a moment, leaving me off-kilter, feeling a ravenous desperation inside me, an imbalanced need to turn and wrap my arms around Ian and have him hold me and tell me what I meant to him. Maybe not declare undying love, but...something.

  And he was still inside me, still thrusting shallowly, milking the last of his orgasm, caressing my hips and my ass and my back with his palm. I was shattered, wrung out, strung out, weak in the knees and fucked in the head.

  Attached.

  Totally, irrevocably attached.

  I'd done what I promised myself I wouldn't do. I'd had sex with a gorgeous, available guy. A somewhat reformed player, if I was reading between the lines correctly. A man with a recently broken heart in desperate need of soothing.

  I can soothe you! my heart said.

  Fuck me! Make love to me! Do every dirty thing you know to me! my body said.

  What the hell are you thinking, you hopeless idiot? He's going to hurt you! my brain said.

  Ian pulled out of me, helped me stand up straight, and then caught me easily when my knees gave out. "Jesus Christ, Nina. What the hell do you do to me?"

  His arms went around my shoulders, he pulled me to his chest, and his sweaty, musky, manly scent filled my nostrils and his radiating heat enveloped me, and his hands feathered gently through my hair. And my heart flipped, flopped, opened, hoped.

  My body told me I could totally come another two or three times.

  And my brain told me not to get
my hopes up, because life didn't work that way. Not really. You don't just meet sexy, hunky, intelligent men on airplanes and have a happily-ever-after with him start on day two of knowing him.

  Day three, now, because it was way after midnight.

  Three days is totally enough time to fall in love, right? I mean, that's not Hollywood, smutty romance novel insta-love, is it?

  I felt myself being moved across the apartment to my darkened bedroom, felt myself drowsing. I let my eyes close; let the maelstrom of conflicting thoughts and emotions barrel through me unimpeded. I felt my bed under me, covers dragged over me, heard the faucet running as Ian cleaned himself. So clean. Clean men are sexy.

  A few moments of silence then, and my internal fears and desires and worries and needs all had a moment of clashing confusion. Did I expect him to leave? Did I want him to stay? I'd never lived with a man before, never shared an entire night of sleep in the same bed. Sex was always in a dorm room with co-ed curfews and no privacy. Always during a stolen afternoon when I should have been studying or writing a paper. An evening spent fucking when I should have been out with friends or visiting my family. None of my boyfriends had ever had their own place to take me, so we'd always had to finish our business and go our separate ways. Meet for dinner, find a quiet spot alone for a few minutes, get to it, get dressed, go about life.

  I was fading into sleep, but I couldn't sense Ian's presence. The faucet was off, the floorboards silent. Would I hear the door close as he decided to find a hotel rather than stay with me? Would I feel the bed dip as he slid in behind me?

  If he got into bed with me, was I supposed to turn into him and make conversation? Spoon with him? Pretend to be asleep and let him figure out his own position?

  But then I felt him nearby, smelled the faint, leftover cologne, the soap from his recent ministrations, and the underlying scent of sex. The bed dipped, but near my knees, on my side. A hand rested on my thigh, near my hip.

  "I'm not quite sure what comes next, if I'm being totally honest." His voice was pitched low, just above a whisper.

  "Me either." I didn't open my eyes, didn't move.

  "What do you want to do?"

  I rolled a shoulder in a shrug. "I've never spent the night with a guy before. Not the whole night."

  He made a noise in his throat, and I wasn't sure how to interpret it. Noncommittal grunt? But then he stood up, crawled onto the bed. I had to open my eyes to watch that, because I had this mental image of Ian, naked and muscular and sexy, prowling across the bed toward me, like something out of a movie.

  Oh Jesus lord, yep. Shoulder muscles rippled, arms tensed and flexed, back was like a playground of angles and planes of definition, and there between his legs, his package swung and swayed. So much man. So much sexiness.

  I pinched the inside of my bicep hard enough to elicit a sharp nasal inhalation. And...yes, he was still real. I seemed to be awake. Me. Nina Herrera. Mexican-American Regency literature nerd. The girl with a bit of a roll at her waist, stretch marks on her tits because they're so big, no gap between her thighs. Even my pussy had curves.

  And there was Ian, big and hard and predatory, a veritable sex god who could probably have and probably has had his pick of pixies and models and actresses and other socially accepted beauties. In my bed. Looking at me like he just couldn't get enough of what I was rocking.

  Even though he'd literally just finished having me (from behind! I wasn't ready to examine how elated I was to have broken that first-time barrier).

  I watched him crawl across the bed toward me, and even though it was a short distance, it felt like I watched it happen in slow-motion, as if my thoughts ran from lust to appreciation, to self-doubt, to awe, and back to lust, all in a few moments.

  God, being a girl was rough. I doubted men had so many thoughts running parallel story lines at once.

  He settled onto the bed beside me, so I rolled to lie flat on my back, my head twisted to look at him.

  "Hi." I couldn't help smiling.

  Internal conflict or not, I had a sexy-as-fuck man in my bed, and I'd be damned if I was going to let my stupid haywire brain stop me from appreciating it.

  "You're a loud thinker, Nina, you know that?" He was on his side, facing me, his hand on the pillow between our faces.

  "I am?"

  "Oh yeah. You're all sorts of mixed up, aren't you?"

  I frowned at him. "How can you tell?"

  His finger touched the bridge of my nose, traced downward. "In the three-ish days that I've known you, I've seen this little line appear just here quite often. And usually, when I see that little line, you're all tensed up and I start to wonder if you're going to just bolt on me or something. What's wrong?"

  "Well, this is my bed, so I can't exactly bolt anywhere, can I?" Hello, question, let me avoid you.

  "Nina." How could he turn one word, my name, into a scold?

  I sighed. "Nothing new, Ian. All of this with you and me, it's nothing I have any experience with. You're like nothing, like no one I've ever experienced. I just--it's intense, and it's confusing, and--it's just a lot."

  "I'm not disagreeing with you."

  "Everything about you is outside every single one of my neat little boxes."

  One corner of his mouth turned up in a sleepy half-smile. "But Nina, you've got to get out of all those little boxes, babe. That's where life happens, outside the box, where things are scary and exhilarating and new."

  "What's outside the box for you, Ian?"

  "In general? Or in this thing with us?"

  "Yes," I answered, letting my eyes slide half-closed.

  "In general, moving back to London, living with Dad. Leaving Mum in Chicago. Being back here with all my old mates. It's weird, because in some ways that's going back in the box, back into an old box that I left behind when I moved to the States. But now I'm back in it, and the box doesn't quite fit anymore, know what I mean?" He rolled onto his back, reached out an arm toward me. "C'mere."

  I scootched closer to him and hesitantly, gingerly, cautiously--whatever other synonyms there are for am I doing this right?--nestled my head into the crook of his arm...

  oh.

  Oh.

  OH.

  OH.

  Nooking. It's...it's motherfucking magical. That spot right where his chest and bicep and shoulder all sort of merge? It's an utterly phantasmagorical place. Soft, yet firm. Warm, comforting, and safe. You can dream and drift and just be cozy and held and protected and sheltered there, because it's the nook. His body beside you is this hulking mountain keeping you hidden away from all the messy life that happens when you have to leave the nook. His arm is around you, under you, and his other hand is free to roam to whichever available bits of anatomy he can find, or he can just cup your hip and hold on and you can slither bonelessly into sleep together.

  "As for us..." he continued, and I'd forgotten that part of the question, so when he said "us" my heart leapt into my throat. "Everything. Christ, just...everything. I mean, what it is? Is this going somewhere? Is it just really great sex? What do you want? What do I want? What's even possible? I don't know where I'm going to be, and I've got to start my new position beginning of next week, which is going to be a shitload of work transitioning and learning their system and what all. And you're leaving for Oxford in a couple weeks, and what then? I don't know."

  "I feel like we've had this same conversation at least twice, now," I say, mumbling against his skin, marveling at the casual perfection of the moment.

  "This is the third time, I think."

  "Yet we never get anywhere new, do we?"

  His laughter rumbled throughout the room. "Not really, no." His finger circled my shoulder, skipped across my neck and down my spine. "But then, I have gotten you to come, what, six times? Seven? So there's that."

  "There is that," I agreed, hiding my blushing face against his muscle.

  I didn't know it was possible, but he somehow felt that blush.

  "You're so cu
te. You scream and writhe and make all these erotic sounds and you're so fucking sexy it makes me literally a bit crazy, like you fucking own me sexually, but then you blush when I talk about it?"

  "Was I too loud?"

  He laughed again. "Seize on the totally wrong thing, why don't you."

  I loved the way he said the word "totally", missing an entire syllable: tote-ly, with the 't' sound pronounced as a kind of hardened voiceless glottal fricative--okay, total IPA geek-out. Sorry. Anyway, point is, I can't allow thoughts like that.

  "I make erotic sounds?"

  "I could come just listening to you come."

  "That sounds kind of meta."

  "Is it? I don't know. All I know is, you're so vocal, and responsive, and...it makes me crazy." Ian's finger jumped up the ridges of my spine and slid down the valleys in between, making a slow, torturously arousing journey toward my ass.

  "I'm not sure if I should be embarrassed or proud," I said.

  "Well certainly don't be embarrassed. I mean, have you really listened to yourself? Listened to the noises you make?" I shook my head. "You should."

  "I should?"

  He didn't answer, as he'd already made his point.

  I'd just let out a little gasp, a tiny intake of breath, short and sharp and quiet. And yeah, it was erotic; he'd traced his finger down between the globes of my ass. I held my breath as his finger slid back up the crease, paused in the divot of the very apex, and then slid his finger back downward, and this time pressed in just a little. When he repeated the pattern, up, pause, and back down, pressing inward yet further, I couldn't help a moan of scandalized pleasure.

  "See? That was so sexy it made my cock twitch."

  "You've proved your point, I think," I said.

  I wasn't sure I was ready to have another life changing, eye-opening, expectation-shattering sexual experience so soon on the heels of all the others.

  "I have, have I?" His voice was gently taunting, skeptical, knowing.

  "You have, you have."

  Ian chuckled. "So does that mean I should stop, then?" His finger halted mid-stroke, coincidentally mere centimeters from my rear opening.

  Or not so coincidentally, perhaps.

  "Stop? No...I--I didn't say that." God, I was such a traitor to myself.

  I knew exactly what Ian was angling toward. He was dead-set on going after each and every one of my most secret, dirtiest fantasies, the things I'd never ever have asked for or initiated, the things I wanted and was scared of and scared of wanting, the things I only even fantasized about in the depths of my imagination when I drifted off to sleep, the kinds of fantasies you don't even dare masturbate to.